Varying activities

I have been sitting like a lemon in Xining. I had found a really good hostel, where most of the staff spoke good English, and the rest some English; it was cheap enough but with everything I wanted; parks, shops, and the city centre within walking distance; and a constant flow of travellers at least half of whom speak English and a great proportion of whom are really interesting people. So what have I been doing? Not a lot more than if I were sat on my boat in Aylesbury. I have been doing two Chinese lessons a day; meditation; browsing the internet; and visiting places of interest in Xining itself.

The only thing I have been doing that I could not do in the UK is sort out some activities and trips and the next stages of my journey and today was the first fruits of that labour. I hired a car and driver to take me to Shaqing Si (monastery) and to Youning Si. The former is a vast sprawling complex of small buildings and temples, with a few score monks wandering about. The temples of the Youning Si monastery are embedded into the side of a mountain, amid dense green forests. The setting alone creates a spiritual, even mystic, atmosphere. The monks here live seem to live a relatively solitary existence, spending most of their time tending to a single temple, a walk away from any of their peers. There is also a substantial community of nuns based here. I had gone there today because there was supposed to be a puja on. There was certainly something going on - a procession of monks and nuns taking a path up into a wooded hill. They were then chanting their prayers and their practice, but there did not seem to be any communal meditation - everybody seemed to be doing their own practice spread out through the woods. There were probably about 200 people involved. By the time I managed to get to the start of the path they were well under way and there was a sussuration of voices coming from all over the hill side. I did not join them - by the time I reached there they were well distributed and well into their practice. There was one nun on a slight peak who vocally outmatched all the other practitioners put together. She was very loud. As you may be able to see from the photograph she was aware of me taking the picture, even though I was about 3/4 mile away.

In the first monastry, some monks were busy putting out offerings - which obviously consisted of the monks foodstuffs. There were huge baskets of fruit, but more peculiar to a western eye were the cases of pot noodles; the cases of soft drinks; and the cases of some sort of tinned grain.

This trip out did show me some things that are new in China/Tibet and some that are the same. New(ish) vehicles driven by tibetans all seem to have battery powered, gold coloured, prayer wheels on the ledge above the dashboard - this is new, such things were not available when I was last here. They are much more effective than having a working fuel gauge in a car. The majority of cars that regularly go up onto the plateau have been converted to run on gas, and this conversion process seems to mess up the fuel gauge beyond recall. The first quarter of my journey today (of about 280 Km) the fuel gauge's lowest segment was flashing indicating very low on fuel. Then for the second quarter of the journey the gauge (an electronic linear display) was showing no fuel at all in the car. The driver then filled up, and the gauge continued to insist that there was no fuel anywhere on the vehicle. The majority of Chinese lorries are now modern lorries - there are still a few of the old reliable blue lorry with a cab and bonnet, but not many. Parking tickets have come to China - when we returned to the hostel, all the cars on one side of the street had a ticket which in common with all Chinese documents had a large official stamp over part of the ticket. The tractor that lit the fuse of the economic growth of China, is still much in evidence in rural areas. The first monastery I visited, which is exceedingly remote, even by the standards of this region, was the first one I've been too, to have pictures of the Dalai Lama on open display. Normally they are there, but on the inside of a cupboard, or positioned so they can be easily swept up with rubbish if need be.

This trip was also very much among peaks that are above the permanent snow line - one whole line of mountains that must have been about 6300 metres.

I have also sorted out participation in a high elevation trek along part of the Kora route round Amnye Machen. I have only been trying to sort this out since before last September. It finally came together about eight days ago. It is not what I wanted to do, but it is the nearest approximation that I am likely to achieve to what I would really like to do. I have also got a trip out tomorrow to a nature reserve, and I have been sorting out my likely activities after the trek. I am probably going to a place deep in Kham, which I can use as a base to do five or six things. I will then have to get to Kunming (method still not clear) to catch the overnight bus (the train line was washed out in 2002 and has never been replaced) to the Vietnamese border and hence to Hanoi. I'll probably spend a couple of days there before catching the (three day) Hanoi-Saigon train and then spending a couple of days in Saigon. Then onto Cambodia and Thailand and beyond.